No matter how colorful they are, or how perfectly crimped their crusts, pies are unreliable cover stars. So are heaps of mashed potatoes, even when melted butter, the color of pure sunlight, pools in their dimples. As a general rule, November’s food magazines lead with the birds.

Turkeys: Voluptuous, browned and gloriously crisp, freckled with salt and pepper. Their flawless skins reflect the studio lights, and on closer inspection seem to glow, as if from within.

For seasoned teams of stylists, photographers and editors, producing a stunning Thanksgiving cover image is as much an annual obligation as the holiday feast — a ritual defined by repetition and compromise, its exhaustive details shaped over months of planning, only to be thrown off by unexpected, last-minute complications.

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Maile Carpenter, editor in chief of Food Network Magazine, meets with staff in her office in Manhattan.CreditNicole Craine for The New York Times

“Thanksgiving is our Super Bowl,” said Maile Carpenter, the editor in chief of Food Network Magazine, which has a print circulation of almost two million. “Every year we ask ourselves, do we seriously have to do another turkey on the cover? And every year, the answer becomes as obvious as ‘Do we have to serve a turkey this year?’ Yes, of course we do.”

Printed covers, aimed primarily at seducing readers at the newsstand, aren’t as important as they once were, before Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and other digital platforms became crucial to the business. But magazine editors say they are still a brand’s calling card, a billboard that drives sales of what is often the biggest, most ad-packed and competitive issue of the year.

Every November for the past decade, Food Network Magazine has placed a whole turkey front and center. “One year — and this was the craziest we ever got — we carved the bird,” Ms. Carpenter said.

That was 2016. Like most editors, Ms. Carpenter is attuned to the smallest changes in turkey presentation, from sizes and props to angles and colors, because they shape the tone of the issue and the reader’s response. The issue with the carved-bird cover sold 21 percent fewer newsstand copies than the previous year’s.

“Thanksgiving is our Super Bowl,” said Ms. Carpenter, who has edited Food Network Magazine for a decade.CreditNicole Craine for The New York Times

This year, the turkey on Food Network Magazine’s cover is whole, roasted to a particularly warm shade of butterscotch brown and shot from overhead on a simple white platter. (“You don’t want the platter to steal attention,” Ms. Carpenter said.) With its wing tips tucked under and its legs neatly tied, the bird reclines on a bed of flat-leaf parsley, surrounded by a few grilled lemon halves.

Adam Rapoport, editor in chief of Bon Appétit, put a carved bird on the cover in 2012 and 2014. “It’s more visually pleasing than a whole bird,” he said. “The whole bird is more iconic, but the whole bird almost looks like an emoji.”

Mr. Rapoport also tried a split cover in 2014: Half of the Thanksgiving issues were printed with the classic turkey, and the other half with a big bowl of buttery mashed potatoes. Though the magazine didn’t track the response, it was — in the cautious, predictable world of November food issues — a daring move.

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In 2014, Bon Appetit experimented with a spllit cover, printing half with a turkey and the other with mashed potatoes.Credit

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Adam Rapoport, the magazine’s editor in chief, called the potato cover, which broke from tradition, one of his all-time favorites.Credit

“I do think with print magazines now, with the importance of the newsstand receding, you can get away with being more experimental,” he said. “You’re not going to get dinged the way you were five, six or seven years ago, when publishing companies were putting so much importance on newsstand sales, and if you were down from previous years you’d really hear about it.”

Though several new American food magazines have appeared in the last few years, most print only once a year, or quarterly, and Thanksgiving isn’t a focus. The more established magazine Saveur decided not to do a Thanksgiving cover at all this year, since it is printing fewer issues.

At the magazines that do keep up the tradition, editorial teams are smaller than they used to be, stretching each year to do more with fewer resources.

“All the past editors spent a whole lot more time worrying about this stuff,” said Lauren Iannotti, the editor in chief of Rachael Ray Every Day, who edited her first November issue last year. She noted that with a leaner staff, and a smaller budget, she doesn’t have the luxury of auditioning several concepts for the cover.

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At the offices of Rachael Ray Every Day, (from left) Tara Holland, Nina Elder, Lauren Iannotti and Janet McCracken tasted a mashed potato recipe for the Thanksgiving issue.CreditNicole Craine for The New York Times

“I don’t want to see five different turkeys with five different gravy spills on my wall, which I’ve seen — it’s like a scene from ‘Silence of the Lambs.’” Instead, Ms. Iannotti said she follows her gut, guided by a simple ethos: “I want to make you want to eat.”

This year, her team went with a single, abundant plate of food, shot so close up that it doesn’t even fit in the frame: sliced turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing and cranberry sauce, all gleaming with a caramel-colored gravy.

To get the image exactly right, balanced in color and texture, browned but not overly brown, Ms. Iannotti said she set aside money in her budget to hire an outside team to help with the Thanksgiving shoot. “They’re brilliant. They’re looking at the gravy color, and is the pepper in the perfect place? And is it messy, but not too messy?”

Magazines strategically aim for different messages with their covers, even if they’re all illustrating a holiday with the same basic visual vocabulary. “Our brand is: We’re not perfectionists! We want a beautiful mess,” Ms. Iannotti said.

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Ms. Iannotti, editor in chief of Rachael Ray Every Day, with Phoebe Flynn Rich, the magazine’s creative director.CreditNicole Craine for The New York Times

Hunter Lewis, the editor in chief of Cooking Light (which will cease publication at the end of the year) and Food & Wine, said discussions about the look and feel of his cover food can start months ahead of the shoot.

“Three years ago, a beautiful plate of simple Thanksgiving food did really well on the newsstand for Cooking Light, so that’s the path we’ve taken for a few years,” Mr. Lewis said.

On this year’s Food & Wine cover, there is no bird. Mr. Lewis said his team decided on a sweet potato casserole, partly covered with a toasted meringue, early in the planning process. “We started talking about doing half the dish with meringue, to please everyone at the table. We asked, how do we elevate this above a homey-looking casserole?”

Mr. Lewis went for a design with symmetry and contrast — the orange sweet potato and singed meringue in a black oval casserole against a geometric black trivet.

“There are times when you know instantly you’ve got it,” he said. “Other times, you shoot for two full days and you don’t know. Because you can plan to the hilt, you can have a whole roomful of props and you can have six turkeys and prepare and prepare and prepare, but until you see the food under the camera, on set, you just don’t know. It’s a feeling.”

Leslie Yazel, the editor in chief of Real Simple, put a whole turkey on the magazine’s cover for the first time this year. Ms. Yazel tested three cover images in September, showing them to more than 500 women and noting their reactions.

She already knew what she didn’t want. She didn’t want to shoot from above (too alienating). She didn’t want to use an overly extravagant floral arrangement (too distracting). She didn’t want a cover that was too brown (the image wouldn’t pop on the newsstand). And she didn’t want to show the whole turkey.

“We wanted it slightly cut off, because it’s not all about the turkey, it’s about having all the elements come together nicely,” she said. The resulting cover shows a tall, spare flower arrangement on the table, but that turkey, roasted with a purée of pepperoni butter under its skin, still draws the reader’s eye.

Examine a number of covers side by side, and you’ll notice how they’ve been carefully designed to control exactly where you look first, as well as where your eye goes next. Elizabeth Graves, the editor of Martha Stewart Living, said there’s a science behind many covers.

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Editors rely on a combination of data and instinct to create a cover image with a clear mood and message, like this Martha Stewart Living cover with four distinct pies.

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Analytics show that carved birds don’t always perform as well as whole birds, but carved birds can make more interesting images.Credit

Analytics have shown that a cover with turkey slices and sides on a plate performs better than one with a whole carved bird. Pies have mixed results, and cakes consistently underperform.

But most editors say they listen to their instincts. They want their covers to evoke an immediate, visceral reaction from readers — a mood, a vibe, an emotion.

“Is it Martha?” Ms. Graves asked. “For it to be a Martha image, it’s not just pretty, it’s also an idea and it has to feel of the brand.” That means that even without any text or a logo, the image has a way of telling readers that it’s Martha Stewart Living.

And that image tends to include turkeys.

“They’re like supermodels,” said Ms. Carpenter, of Food Network, who added that although there’s plenty of fussing over every detail of the birds, there’s no food-styling trickery involving hot glue or spray paint or other inedible ingredients. After the big shoot, which usually takes place in the summer, her team always goes home with plenty of perfectly seasoned leftover meat.

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Ms. Carpenter said that a November cover with Ina Garten and a turkey was a big success.Credit

“The only time we didn’t do a bird, we put Ina on the cover,” she said, referring to a 2014 cover that featured Ina Garten. “And that’s probably the best thing you could ever put on your November cover: Ina and a turkey.”

Tejal Rao is the California restaurant critic at The Times and a columnist for the The New York Times Magazine, based in Los Angeles. She has won two James Beard Foundation awards for her restaurant criticism. @tejalrao